BBC Radio World Service
Learning English Programs in China

—What about a picnic this Sunday?

—______.

A. Sounds great         B. I think so       C. That’s nothing

Brian is my good friend. He has a five-year-old daughter, Lydia. Lydia likes animals very much and always   1  to have a dog. This Sunday is Lydia's birthday. Brian wants to buy  2  a dog. So he goes to the   3  near his home. He says hello to Paul, the owner（主人）of the store. Paul says hello to him, too. Brian says, "This is a clean and   4   pet store." Then he walks around the store.   5  he doesn't see any pets. "Excuse me.   6  are the pets?" he asks. "The pets are right here," says Paul. Then Paul   7  him a catalog（目录簿）. Brian sees   8  pictures of pets in it, like dogs, cats and birds. "You only need to   9  me the pet you like," says Paul. "We can mail（邮寄）it to you." "What if I don't like it?" asks Brian. "  10  mail it back," says Paul. "Oh, sounds interesting," says Brian.

For many people the subject of hiccups (嗝) is a joke, but for Harry Mendes, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from Birmingham, it was something quite different.
His hiccups began one Sunday lunch time and continued day and night for two weeks. After the first week, Harry’s parents took him to hospital, but it took another week for the doctors to cure his attack.
Harry, who is now back at school, described what happened to him.
“When I began to hiccup, I drank a glass of water but that didn’t do any good. That evening I had hiccups every four seconds. We tried everything to stop them. I held my breath and drank cold drinks. My father even tried to give me a shock but that didn’t work either.”
After a week of sleepless nights, he went to hospital. The doctors took an X-ray of his chest but they couldn’t find anything wrong.
“They gave me some medicine and my hiccups slowed down, but it was another week before the medicine worked completely and my hiccups stopped.”
Harry was very lucky. The world record holder is the American farmer Charles Osborne, who hiccupped for sixty-eight years. He stopped in 1990 at last, but nobody knows why.
【小题1】Harry’s hiccups lasted ____.

--- Will you go to Lucy’s birthday party this Sunday, Li Lei?
--- I      if you      .